Albums
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Michael Hersch’s Violin Concerto immediately hurls us into a wrenching scene …
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a harrowing experience ... urgent, commanding, able to communicate without shouting and without cliche
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Hersch's music occupies itself with aspects of the darkest side of human experience ... a minutely textured and detailed landscape of desolation and introspective despair.
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music with emotional immediacy that explores aching vulnerability with consummate eloquence
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the journey left you in a figurative blindfold taken off momentarily to glimpse another previously unimaginable terrain.
POPPAEA
Recording Release February 2024 (available both digitally and on CD)
New Focus Recordings (FCR-390)
A production of Wien Modern and ZeitRäume Basel
Ah Young Hong / Steve Davislim / Silke Gäng
Ensemble SoloVoices
Ensemble Phoenix Basel
Jürg Henneberger
Michael Hersch: the script of storms
New Focus Recordings (FCR-344)
Release Date: September 16, 2022
Ah Young Hong, soprano
Tito Muñoz, conductor
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Ensemble Klang
Over the decades, composer Michael Hersch has worked closely with some of the most powerful poetical voices of our time. Fawzi Karim (1945-2019) and Christopher Middleton (1926-2015) are two poets whose texts Hersch has explored often in his music. The two pieces on this recording, the script of storms and cortex and ankle, display music that composer Georg Friedrich Haas has described as an "unconditional, radical expressivity that reveals the human abyss without any palliation." Soprano Ah Young Hong, the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Tito Muñoz, and Ensemble Klang perform.
Michael Hersch on Fawzi Karim
I hope we get a chance to visit soon
New Focus Recordings (FCR-251)
Release Date: May 22, 2020
Ah Young Hong, soprano
Kiera Duffy, soprano
Tito Muñoz, conductor
Musicians of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra
Live recording from the 2018 Aldeburgh Music Festival Recorded by the BBC
Released by arrangement with BBC Music
New Focus releases Michael Hersch's I hope we get a chance to visit soon, the long-awaited companion piece to his critically acclaimed monodrama, On the Threshold of Winter. Scored for two sopranos and ensemble, the work continues Hersch's exploration of several themes he has engaged with often in recent years, cancer and loss.
Michael Hersch: Carrion-Miles to Purgatory
New Focus Recordings (FCR-229)
Release Date: May 31, 2019
Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violin
Miranda Cuckson, violin
Jay Campbell, cello
Michael Hersch, piano
This collection of recent duos by composer Michael Hersch gives the listener a chance to hear the intense expressive contrasts so characteristic of his music in a profoundly intimate context. From jarring, closely spaced intervals, to delicate, ethereal harmonics, to bracingly virtuosic passagework, Hersch’s voice projects strongly throughout this recording featuring three of his most frequent performer collaborators: Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Miranda Cuckson, and Jay Campbell, as well as the composer himself on the piano.
Michael Hersch: end stages / Violin Concerto
New Focus Recordings (FCR-208)
Release Date: July 6, 2018
Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violin
Tito Muñoz, conductor
International Contemporary Ensemble
Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
Virtuoso violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, for whom Michael Hersch's Violin Concerto was composed, wrote recently of the piece that it "is an open wound, there is no other way to say it." She continued, the work "is so convincing ... moves me so deeply, makes me speechless, tolerates neither doubt nor objection. It is like a mountain one can't ignore ... everything is crystal clear, there is no decoration, no superficial beauty, no compromises. Everything is exactly in place, has found its perfect form." A follow up to his haunting Images from a Closed Ward, New Focus releases Hersch's Violin Concerto, performed by Kopatchinskaja with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), and end stages in a performance by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. With both pieces, Hersch reinforces his reputation as a composer of gripping music, unafraid to tackle through sound the most vulnerable and difficult corners of the human psyche.
Michael Hersch: Black Untitled
Ensemble Klang Records (#09)
Release Date: September 4, 2017
Ensemble Klang with Ah Young Hong
Black Untitled reveals a music of unfiltered, visceral intensity. Presenting two works by Michael Hersch (1971), Ensemble Klang delve into an oeuvre that explores the frailty and destruction of the human body. In "cortex and ankle" with soprano Ah Young Hong, they invoke a ritual of sound and space; while the stark and single-minded meditation of "Black Untitled" further reveals an unflinching music of “strange excitement”, one that even when sparingly written can leave the listener gasping for breath.
Michael Hersch: Images From a Closed Ward
New Focus Recordings (FCR-208)
Release Date: July 6, 2018
The FLUX Quartet
Composer Michael Hersch's string quartet Images from a Closed Ward, performed here with absolute commitment by the New York based FLUX Quartet, is inextricably connected to his friendship with the late American artist Michael Mazur. More specifically, Hersch was inspired by a series of etchings and lithographs Mazur did of inmates in a Rhode Island mental asylum in the 1960's. In his musical depiction of these images, Hersch writes music that is at times aggressive and disturbing and at other times introspective and alienated, but always posseses profound intensity and deeply felt humanity.
Michael Hersch: The Vanishing Pavilions
New Focus Recordings (fcr335)
Release Date: June 17, 2022
Vanguard Classics / Musical Concepts (MC-101)
[2 CD Box Set], 2007
Michael Hersch, piano
Michael Hersch’s The Vanishing Pavilions, originally released in 2007 as a 2-CD boxed set, is the first part of his ten-hour, three-part cycle, sew me into a shroud of leaves. The recording was released to acclaim on the Vanguard Classics/Musical Concepts label, with the composer at the keyboard.
Michael Hersch: the wreckage of flowers
Works for Violin
New Focus Recordings (fcr334)
Release Date: June 17, 2022
Vanguard Classics (MC-105), November 2010
Miranda Cuckson, violin
Blair McMillen, piano
Michael Hersch’s haunting disc of violin works, the wreckage of flowers, features all of Hersch’s music for violin written during the first decade of the 2000s. The recording, originally released in 2010, includes two works for unaccompanied violin: Five Fragments and Fourteen Pieces, alongside Hersch’s large-scale work for violin and piano of 2003, the wreckage of flowers: 21 pieces after texts of Czeslaw Milosz. Violinist Miranda Cuckson and pianist Blair McMillen perform.
Michael Hersch: Chamber Music
Vanguard Classics (ATM-CD-1240)
Release Date: 2003
String Soloists of the Berlin Philharmonic
Michael Hersch, piano
"The disc, titled "Michael Hersch: Chamber Music," features Hersch himself on piano as well as string soloists from the Berlin Philharmonic. The disc's highlight is probably a vast octet for strings in 11 movements that lasts half an hour and seems an encyclopedic exploration of deepest darkness, shot through with anxious energy. A "Recordatio" for solo piano was inspired by the death of Luciano Berio, one of many diverse and extraordinary older composers (George Rochberg and Hans Werner Henze are two others) who have recognized and encouraged Hersch's melancholy genius. These are remarkably original and assured pieces -- best of all, Hersch, still in his early thirties, may just be getting started."
— The Washington Post
Michael Hersch: Sonatas Nos. 1 & 2 for Unaccompanied Cello
Vanguard Classics (MC-104)
Release Date: 2009
Daniel Gaisford, cello
"Michael Hersch's Sonata No. 1 for unaccompanied cello is one of his earliest published works, written when he was 23, in 1994. The riveting piece, given a gripping performance by Daniel Gaisford, is included on the first of three discs featuring Mr. Hersch ’s solo and chamber music for string instruments, being released by Vanguard Classics."
— The New York Times
Hersch – Josquin – Rihm – Feldman
Vanguard Classics (ATM-CD-1558)
Release Date: 2004
Michael Hersch, piano
Daniel Gaisford, cello
"Michael Hersch's Sonata No. 1 for unaccompanied cello is one of his earliest published works, written when he was 23, in 1994. The riveting piece, given a gripping performance by Daniel Gaisford, is included on the first of three discs featuring Mr. Hersch ’s solo and chamber music for string instruments, being released by Vanguard Classics."
— The New York Times
A Breath Upwards
Innova Records (#986)
Release Date: Mar 23, 2018
Ah Young Hong
Music, song, and poetry have long enjoyed a stimulating relationship; coming together for expressive ends and sometimes colliding in dramatic showdowns. None more so than in these vocal works by two composers who often explore extremes, Milton Babbitt and Michael Hersch.